Jeff Bezos on Amazon Leadership principles

Leaders are right, a lot

Such people who are right a lot are hvaing following characteristics->
a. they listen a lot.

b. they change their mind a lot.
Why ->
Life is complicated rules are complicated and so when you get more data, you change your mind.
Sometimes you don't get data but just re-analyze a situation and change your mind.
Anybody who doesn't change mind a lot underestimates the complexity of world we live in.

c. they seek to disconfirm their most profoundly held convictions.

Frugality

Having small team size makes sense - so that essence of human organization - team work and cohesion comes up.
If team size is large, leader should make more sub-leaders so that communication and performance can be effective.

Hire smart people

No single individual person can keep in touch with plethora of new things that are happening.
So you need a recruitment process to hire and retain smart talented hard-working people who want to be part of your mission.

What is Amazon's Mission : be the world's most customer-centric company
Its a goal larger than Amazon.
This involves 3 things -> listen, invent, personalize.
- Companies that don't listen to customer cannot survive.
- Companies that only listen to customer fail. They need to invent and find novice solutions to customer's problems.
It is not customer job to invent, it is company's job and if they fail to do so, they cannot survive.
- See each and every customer as centre of their own universe ~ personalize.

On work=life balance.

We should use then term work-life harmony.
If you are happy at work, you come home as a better husband, father and person.
And if you have harmony at home, you come to office as better employee.
Organizations must strive to ensure harmony at workspace.

Learn & be curious, bias for actions

For most people harmony at work means finding work which is meaningful, interesting and impactful.
Because of kind of challenges we have chosen for ourselves, we get to work for future and its super fun to work for the future.
We work in environment where there is constant change. This is how high-tech domain is.
If one doesnt enjoy this environment, they wont be able to sustain in long term.

We need to build people, and it is human nature to focus on things that aren't working, and its incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets.
That is something we need to encourage because bets are prone to failure, but those that succeed, they can compensate for dozens of things that didn't work.
At amazon, it took some bold bets that worked out really well- Kindle, AWS, Prime, etc.

Companies that don't embrace failure, they eventually get into position of desperation.

Have backbone , disagree and commit | dive deep ; be skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ

Generally assumed that companies need to eventually raise prices in order to increase profit margins.
Amazon wants to lower price further because it sees things in terms of scale.
Unlike physical stores wherein good service and low prices both aren't available, online stores can have both best service and lowest prices.
Need to increase profit not in terms of % margins but in terms of dollar margins, i.e. sell more product - when you lower price, you attract more people and more sales - so more profit.

Credits : Link